Month: February 2007

Dave Perry dropped this tip to me after a brief mention of us needing something to draw three classes together and pool resources. I proposed Google Groups, not least because it is a focussed contact mechanism, and very easy to get a message into people’s life.

I am a fan of Google Groups for maintaining a group dynamic, and spreading the latest news and word quickly. Recently I seem to be collecting them at an impressive rate, I’ve created about 10 now for various communities.

This new resource though does seem pretty neat too, albeit entirely different:

http://sound-swicki.eurekster.com

In their own words Swicki is “Swickis are a cross between search engines and Wikipedia – the community can add, delete and improve the results”.

So give it a go, have a play I might blog some more on this once I’ve also played a touch.

The modification is a superb tool and took no more than, what 30 mins, from start to finish. The end result is a unique rss feed for each individual forum thread on the board!

Naturally this is the way forward, not least because it means a user can subscribe to whatever niche they desire rather than the whole board. So for example if you were particularly interested in pre-amps, you’d subscribe to just that RSS feed about pre-amps etc.

The feed is also shown by way of an image on each page, which is a bonus as the spiders should be getting to work right now crawing like crazy through that lot. In fact today I have noticed a significant spike in traffic, which may be conincidental, but I think not. I’ll check the web logs over the next few days to confirm.

I was wondering today, on a return journey back from a degree validation meeting, about student loan consolidation rates. In the UK students are expected to take out study loans in order to pay for their university experience, and I know this to be the case in many countries.

My wondering was due to the fact that most students embark on a three year degree plan, which when considering accommodation fees, tuition fees, living expenses means that a serious amount of debt can be accumulated, and needs consolidating, I was predicting anywhere between around 15-20k!

I also am aware that government legislation is such that the loan does not have to be consolidated until the student, once in employment, earns more than a set amount, and then it is fractional I believe.

Some have been known to say that the loan debt can almost be written off as a small monthly tax for a very extended period of time.

So I am now curious to investigate more about student loan consolidation rates in terms of the fractional percentages and time-scales, at least as a means to be able to answer potential studies, when asked on this subject.

I have a friend who helps to consolidate loans, well he doesn’t actually consolidate the loans, that would be untrue, but he does work for a loan consolidation company.

Humpa works for US Debt Resolve, which is basically a loan consolidation company. I think I mentioned these guys indirectly on a previous blog when I was off to Texas, which is their H.Q.

I spent some time with them, while in Texas, discussing internet marketing, and had a blast in the process. Though this was almost 12 months ago it has been interesting to see them grow and last thing I heard they are doing great.

Humpa has worked hard with them recently and I’ll blog up anything that is related soon.

They have some interesting bits n bobs on their site, but less face it that’s one tough competetive market to crack on the internet.

I was trying to get Scott into Podcasting while I was there, he is such a great speaker and bubbles enthusiastically about his trade, would make a great show.